Solution patterns of software engineering for the system design of advanced mechatronic systems

Recently, mechatronics as a self-contained discipline has doubtlessly shaped the development of technical systems. Mechatronics means the close interaction of mechanics, electronics, control engineering and software engineering in order to achieve a better systems behavior. Due to the advancement of information and communication technologies, the functionality of mechatronic systems will go far beyond current standards along with the potential to increase their robustness, flexibility and reliability. The design of such advanced mechatronic systems is a challenge. The increasing complexity requires a consistent comprehension of the tasks between all the developers involved. Especially during the early design phases (conceptual design/ system design), the communication and cooperation between the mechanical, electrical, control and software engineers is necessary to design a first overall system model. In this context, the main difficulty is how to integrate into a system model the solutions that have already been successfully used and described in detail. Currently, the reuse is partially established during discipline-specific engineering - in areas such as mechanics and software engineering. Nevertheless, a catalogue of domain-spanning reusable abstracts that may describe solution patterns for holistic system designs does not exist. Hence, to create a collective solution space as wide as possible, it is necessary to abstract gradually the discipline-specific described solutions on a generic level. The precondition is a functional description. It is easy to see that a function has to depict the solution in a neutral and abstract way as well as the volitional relation between the input and the output of a system. In our work, we present the necessary abstraction of domain specific solutions exemplified by reusable and detailed described solutions of software engineering.